Serena was quiet for a long moment. Then, slowly, she reached up with her free hand and touched his face—a feather-light brush of fingers against his jaw.
“We should go inside,” she said. “Before someone sees us and starts the gossip that will ruin us both.”
“Probably wise.”
Neither of them moved.
“I am not saying yes,” Serena said carefully. “I am not agreeing to anything, not yet. There is too much to consider, too many obstacles to overcome. But I am also not saying no. I am saying... I am saying that I need time. To think. To understand what I feel and what it means.”
“That is all I ask.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, we continue as we have been. I shall attempt—attempt—to behave with appropriate decorum. And you shall continue to care for the children and transform myhousehold and make me question everything I thought I knew about myself and my life.”
Serena smiled, and it was like sunrise.
“That,” she said, “I can do.”
She released his hand and stepped back, composing herself with visible effort. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier, more controlled.
“I should return to the children. I have already neglected my duties shamefully this morning.”
“You were ill. No one expects you to—”
“I expect it of myself.” But her tone was gentle, not sharp. “That is who I am, Nathaniel. Whatever else happens between us, that will not change. I am a governess. I take my responsibilities seriously.”
“I know. It is one of the things I lo—” He stopped himself. “One of the things I admire about you.”
Serena held his gaze for a moment longer, something warm and complicated in her eyes. Then she turned and walked toward the house, her steps measured and careful but steadier than they had been the day before.
Nathaniel watched her go, his heart pounding, his thoughts in chaos.
He had told her. He had actually told her the truth about how he felt.
And she had not rejected him.
Chapter Seventeen
Serena stood at the window of the schoolroom, watching the children play in the garden below. The grounds were strewn with the storm’s remnants—broken branches, scattered leaves, a handful of roof tiles that had come loose during the worst of the wind—but the gardeners were already at work, restoring order to the chaos.
Order. That was what she most needed to restore to her own thoughts, which had been in tumult since her conversation with Nathaniel in the garden the morning before.
I am falling in love with you, and I do not know how to stop.
The words echoed in her mind, as they had since he spoke them. She had replayed the moment a hundred times, weighing every phrase, every pause, every look that had passed between them. She had lain awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of what had happened—and of what it might mean.
A marquess had declared his love for her. A marquess. Forher—a governess with no family, no fortune, no connections of consequence.
It was the stuff of novels. The sort of romantic fancy that sensible women were meant to dismiss as dangerous folly, fit only to end in heartbreak or ruin.
And yet.
And yet he had said it. Had looked at her with those clear grey eyes, unguarded and sincere, and told her that she mattered to him—that he thought of her constantly, that he wanted her, not some suitable lady of his own rank, buther.
Serena pressed her forehead to the cool glass and allowed herself, just for a moment, to imagine it: herself as Lady Greystone, mistress of this house, guardian to the children she had come to love, wife to a man who saw her—truly saw her—in a way no one ever had before.
It was a beautiful dream. And a terrifying one.
